I intended a more pointed discussion of Bowen and Tobin’s Locus of Authority and their take on how faculty’s participation in the governance of higher education is at risk.  I started reading their book last Fall, before the reading list assigned it, because of what is happening at my small private university in Long Island.  Given the topic, perhaps my distraction is an appropriate tangent, especially since the former President of this institution is this week’s guest speaker.

Monday night, the Faculty Senate held its election.  The Chair of Faculty Senate, arguably the highest ranked and the voice of the “Faculty,” is retiring next Fall as part of an offering  to clear some of the faculty lines (for younger scholars or contingent faculty … depends on how dark you want to get).  Before I continue, permit me one more tangent.  Adelphi University is notorious in that twenty or so years ago, its President and Board of Trustees were ousted by the faculty after evidence of improprieties surfaced.  (When you start working there, you hear the story at least twice day for the first three months — it’s a greeting and a cautionary tale.) A new board was established, and after an interim President, and Matthew Goldstein vacated the Presidency for the Chancellory of CUNY, Robert Scott became its President.  He pulled Adelphi out of the fiscal ruin, restored its standing, enrollment, and began an ambitious campus renewal project.  All happy endings, except in one aspect.  The faculty dining room was abolished.  There is no faculty real estate on campus outside of the faculty’s outside/lab/department.  So for shy of twenty years, faculty have had no place to meet, collaborate, eat, collect.  At one point, it was a bar and dining room and there are rumors of scholars drinking and dancing and being “The Faculty.”  Now nothing.

It struck me as odd when I started there two years ago, one and half years after Scott handed the reins to the new President, Christine Riordan.   And I found it also odd that I was introducing faculty to each other, faculty who had taught on campus for more than ten years.  They were strangers to each other.   I also found it odd that the faculty weren’t aware that they were “The Faculty.”  They acted like adjuncts, commuting in to teach and then quickly dashing off for some other pressing call.  They sat in meetings quietly while administrators reported out.  They endure (present tense) the most insulting finance processes and labor under unhelpful or unsupportive sponsored research protocols.  Untenured faculty engaged in the majority of institutional service, because they must (for tenure) show evidence of service.  Adelphi eats its young.  But more disturbing from my stand point was that they weren’t respected, not by the Provost or academic staff, or the operational administration.  They have been infantilized.

Fast forward to Monday night.  Senate is generally a collection of older faculty, mostly men, and first and second year untenured faculty, some random lecturers and visiting faculty because the colleges send them.  Old Men and Children on its Front Lines.  So our Chair, who led the revolt to unseat the unscrupulous President and Board twenty years ago, is stepping down.  The call for nominees to replace him and the senate executive committee were met with silence.  Finally one nominee was announced.  She is a lecturer in our General Studies program.  She was unanimously elected.  She, without a Dean to shield her, without any security is now tasked with negotiating on behalf of the faculty, against an increasingly autocratic administration, and oh, I forgot  to add that she is also very young and a faculty of color.  Courage is obvious her middle name.  Courage or naïveté.  It doesn’t matter.  She is doomed to fail, in spite of her courage or intelligence or efforts.  Tenure exists for a reason.  But step back with me for a second and question, what happened to the faculty?

Bowen and Tobin in their first chapters talk about the history of faculty authority in shared governance.  When faculty were transient in their careers and institutional commitment, they held no power.  They were not regarded as professionals.  When there was a strong president and/or board, the faculty didn’t hold equal power.  All these conditions exist in the present day at Adelphi.  But I harken back to real estate problem..  When the faculty cannot convene, cannot connect, they cannot organize, cannot deliberate, they have no voice.  Given that this network of scholars is under threat by technology, by the siloing between departments (though I find the students see significant interplay and overlap in disciplines), I wonder if the faculty of Adelphi will ever regain their place at the table.

In his closing arguments, Christopher Newfield is accusatory of the governing private-good paradigm that enables policy errors resulting in a devolutionary cycle. He writes, “one of the things being sacrificed…was the ability to expand intensive, personalized teaching from elite private colleges to mass-access publics where most of today’s multiracial majority get their bachelor’s degrees”. He argues that if we start a recovery cycle from a public good conception of higher education, we may be able to provide intensive, personalized teaching.

I’m provoked to ask that if a neoliberal agenda undermined the university’s ability to provide creative capabilities, what kind of agenda will nourish the university so that it can deliver them as an emerging private good the indirect, nonmarket, and social benefits? Newfield advocates strong public funding to create creative capabilities, such as miming at traffic stops. Fanciful as it may seem, be believes that a public investment of public universities creates a “virtuous” cycle that leads to high-quality instruction at a mass scale, and high levels of aggregate learning. These are the direct first steps, in Newfield’s purview, to the University being recognized as a public good.

If sponsored research is bad the public university, what measures outside of outright banning these organizations, would prevent private individuals and firms to externalize their cost onto the university? Newfield considers that if public universities sever ties with research sponsors, then the poverty of arts, humanities, and qualitative social science fields will cease. It would be interesting to see how it all plays out.

Regarding Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence (2011), which functions as both diagnostic and prescriptive of the current state of academic publishing, the touting of the public blog and the practice of blogging features quite prominently throughout. Positioned as appropriately resuscitative to the grim fate that awaits (or is already here!) scholarly publishing, in addition to questions of authorship and digital technologies, the emphasis on blogging, as opposed to other modes of public writing and expression, gave me considerable pause.

With specific respect to authorship, Fitzpatrick celebrates the blog, both its design and function, because of its promotion of collaboration. She argues that scholarship, “even in fields in which sole authorship is the norm, has always been collaborative,” (12) and what blog platforms and the practice of blogging allows is for peer review in process and the public evolution of ideas. This quality seemingly responds to those scholars who feel “over-isolated, longing for new modes of collaboration and discussion,” marking a revival of the “coffee-house model of textual circulation,” (108). And while there is nothing inherently wrong with this advocacy of blogging, particularly for established scholars, comfortably situated within tenured positions or those who have already negotiated the “publish or perish” demands of academe, Fitzpatrick largely assumes the (superior) value of blogging for students and younger scholars.

Pedagogically, blogging is often extended as an opportunity for students to make their work public and interact with each other’s writing in a forum that is presumed “native” to their generations. Similarly, blogging is promoted as a digital alternative to traditional scholarly writing, allegedly emphasizing process over product, and is often embraced by institutions who provide platforms for such work to be published. Because of its digital nature and the “technologies of searching, filtering, and archiving that have developed across the web,” confirming a “surprising durability” (6), blogging has been effectively elevated to and enfolded in the academic milieu.

Where I struggle with this promotion of blogging as both antidotal to the demise of academic publishing opportunities and platforms as well as a significant methodological and pedagogical tool, is the perceived lack of consideration regarding the “substitut[ion] of one set of sign systems, meaning-making strategies, and communicative technologies for another while working to denigrate what has come before (Shipka, Transmodality in/and Processes of Making: Changing Dispositions and Practice). The mere inverting of existing hierarchies is hardly an intervention in those systems of power and knowledge that bolster the academy.

Given this week’s upcoming discussion of Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s book, Planned Obsolescence, which includes a chapter on the status and purpose of university presses, this article in today’s Chronicle seems pertinent.

https://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/The-Future-of-the-University/118#.XMbtA33VR5I.email 

Pinocchio Jobs

“A boy who won’t be good might just as well be made of wood”

Thoughts on excerpts from Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works

First, thanks to Steve for assigning Chapter 4 of Marc Bousquet’s book. The interplay between the individual and society vis-a-vis the “working scholar” motif is a great supplement to our discussions of the university writ large.

The president of Harvard and others, according to Bousquet, have tended to portray the university as “victims of history” (10) meaning that the austere and technocratic innovations made to higher education could not be avoided (154). But victims occasionally become predators, sometimes they become opportunistic. We live in a culture imbued with the philosophy of desert. This can probably be traced back to Calvinist if not Puritanical notions of divine signs coming through mundane happenstance and luck; though going so far back unnecessary. The university, perhaps under duress from its governmental parents cries of poverty, but also in an effort at self-transformation and autonomy, entered a marriage of convenience with business. Business is of course known for its gallant stewardship; indeed it has guided towards such wrecks as the Great Depression. For Bousquet, this convenient narrative holds the university faultless but also obviates the more pervasive issue of the toll that late capitalism takes on everyone from cradle to grave, with higher education often placed as a critical juncture in the lives of youth in developed nations.

In the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century we teach that victimhood is a rite of passage, a mystical adventure that all must endure in order to successfully complete the quest and emerge a hero (see the book GRIT.) Often this quest is towards “adulting”, which rather than a fiat of anniversary, is now a discrete set of activities that one must conduct upon completion of the adolescent quest. Self-identification plays role in keeping the mechanism of “super-exploitation” moving. Employees who identify as something other than workers (146) are critical to exploitative labor practices. Those who identify as students are less likely to complain about conditions and wages and more likely to blame themselves if they cannot manage the Herculean feat of balancing work, and school (147). The aftermath of the experience of low-wage pink- and blue-collar work is a disassociated view of those performing the same tasks.

Like a ten-year frat hazing of climbing to a white-collar job; the journey through a doctoral program is also painfully exploitative, Bousquet “excrement” analogy (26), though jarring, does give metaphorical structure to an experience that can be just as disassociating and disorienting as that of the UPS student/worker. While the lack of academic work for PhDs is excused by “alternate careers” (because ten years of Classics obviously recommends writing pharmaceutical copy); the obscene exploitation of undergraduates qua workers is likewise excused as a support for their dreams.

The fecundity promised to society by that marriage of convenience has not sired any real children. Instead it creates a repletion of wooden facsimiles that may one day become real, but only after a harrowing adventure, many demonstrations of learned obedience, and only happens “when you wish upon a star.”

How culpable is academe for the state of faculty hiring? Has the traditional structure of higher ed as an assemblage of “content experts” (while a mark of expertise and attainment) given edu-business an excuse to treat content delivery as the primary mission of the university?

I’ve scanned and posted in the File folder on the Group site the readings from the Tolley book for next week’s class, including the chapter on CUNY by Luke Elliott-Negri, who is a doctoral  student at GC and head of the GC PSC chapter. Luke will be joining us next week for our discussion of academic precarity. I’ve also chosen two chapters, the Intro  and Ch. 4 (on students) in the Bosquet book, which is available online. I’ve tried to keep the reading this coming week a bit lighter (about 150 pages). Please read everything. See you next week.

David Noble’s work on “digital diploma mills” is compelling—though, as Steve Brier and Roy Rosenzweig note in their review of the volume in which Noble’s 1998 essay was republished (largely without any alterations or updates to the text), Noble’s arguments fail to entice nearly twenty years after their generation. That said, his conclusions—about tuition and faculty labor—remain powerful despite their apparently flimsy foundations.

Noble insists the campus is “a significant site of capital accumulation” for two reasons. The university’s changing “research function” as one centered since the late 1970s on “research products” patented specifically for “the market” has commoditized the university’s output and external relevance, while a commoditization of “the university’s research function” affects “instruction itself.” By transforming instruction into a “commercially viable proprietary procuc[t],” he writes, “courses” turn “into courseware.”

This careful rhetorical distinction usefully illuminates the proto-Newfieldian argument Noble prefigures—but, as isn’t the case with Newfield, Noble relies too much on this courses-into-courseware maxim without elaborating on how the faculty he positions as chief agents of this switch or “conver[sion]” are perhaps much more compromised than he makes them out to be—in other words, Noble’s insufficient attention to adjunct labor makes the “courseware” refrain ring hollow. Not that adjunctification of the university is necessarily a bigger problem and therefore merits more discussion, mind you—I’m just suggesting that the retrospective privilege that history affords to our current moment allows the adjunct crisis (and it is a crisis—it’s much more than a simple shift, as Noble and others, including myself, might be inclined to argue) to dwarf his fixation on “courseware.” Noble’s pithy summary of malicious softwares and “courseware[s]”—“while [students] are studying their courses,” he writes, “their courses are studying them” (!)—is absolutely still the case. The adjunct question is more pressing and more urgent, in short, than the “courseware” one, which still healthily exists.

To be fair, the adjunctification problem wasn’t as acute for Noble and his moment than it is for us in ours. But this trend, though slightly different from the one Noble seizes, nonetheless suffers nearly all the same ills. Students prefer in-person classes over online work, and students prefer professors instead of barely-trained graduate students. Noble, to his credit, recognizes the profound irony in students’ preference not to take online courses. This negative preference is a prime example of just the same market-style approach to education he describes in his second description (of the university as a “commercially viable proprietary produc[t]”; see above), rejection being, of course, “the definition of effective demand, i.e., a market.”

Despite these comparatively minor oversights, Noble’s piece is still useful. Some of his powerful ending questions are worth quoting in full:

If students are taking courses which are just experiments, and hence of unproven pedagogical value, should students be paying full tuition for them? And if students are being used as guinea pigs in product trials masquerading as courses, should they be paying for these courses or be paid to take them?

I’ll respond to these questions with a provocation, as is the mandate of these posts: I’m barely twenty-three, my B.A. just a year old—how am I at all qualified to teach—not just to tutor, but to teach—college classes when my ears still ring from my own? Furthermore, if it’s the case that, as the GC’s career counselors and placement officers have advised me time and again, my teaching experience has trained me exceptionally well to handle the classrooms that come with a tenure-track job (for this, of course, is still their aim: to place Ph.D.s in prestigious tenure-track positions as a way less to aid its doctoral graduates and more to demonstrate the program’s robust health and to better its own reputation etc.), then isn’t my teaching more for my benefit as a future scholar-teacher than for my students’ benefit?

If this is the case, then this makes my work the very kind of “experimen[t]” Noble’s above questions argue against. The experiment, in short, of “[p]roven pedagogical value” to me, of course, but “unproven” still to my students, given that they’re the “guinea pigs in product trials.” If learning to teach is part of graduate schools pedagogy of “professionalization,” then my classroom is more my playroom than my students’. And if this is the case, Noble’s point about tuition is still pertinent even if the thing being tried or trialed isn’t “courseware” and but my teaching. Invoking Noble, we might now ask: Should my students be paying for my education? for the privilege to be “guinea pigs,” the chief objects of my course in professionalization? And shouldn’t my students be compensated for their labor in the classroom—for their willingness, in other words, to put up with me while I figure out how I best navigate the classroom “experimen[t]” I’ll face for the rest of my career?

(((This paragraph pushes this meditation’s prevocational limits—usefully, I hope.))) Indeed, when we think about it, classroom teaching isn’t all that labor-intensive. It takes some setup and forethought, to be sure, and a lot of time responding to student writing, which can (but doesn’t have to be) particularly labor-intensive, and some office-hour guidance. But most of the work in a class is done by students. Even if one student “puts in” “as much” “work” as an instructor, the sheer volume of student labor time far eclipses the instructor’s total hours. In an ideal sense, classroom labor is equalized: whether you’re Freire—who insists that instructors divest themselves of the transactional model of the student-as-bank-to-be-filled and instead engages in an as-equal-as-possible dialectical relation–or you’re Milton—whose “hillside,” which is “laborious indeed at the first ascent” but “full of goodly prospect,” can only be hiked on one’s own, even if “one’s own” means hiking in a group of individuals who all carry their own weight, instructors included—you can’t deny that the primary demand of all teaching is learning, is teaching-oneself-to-teach-others.

Yet this is a dangerous argument to make because its central premise—that instructional labor is only a tiny fraction of the total labor the classroom demands—is liable to malicious reappropriation in service of arguments in favor of increasing adjunct and contingently-laboring instructors. We might imagine this dangerous refrain: “If it’s the case that instructors don’t labor and/or are their classroom’s primary beneficiary—as this one seems to be saying here—, then why are we paying adjuncts at all?” But this refrain might also rely on the age-old assumption that leisure is necessary to learning—that, in other words, one must possess enough preexisting capital to “risk” two or four or however many years’ worth of forfeited income—why else would students come as “guinea pigs”? The “reward” that motivates this “risk” is, of course, the possibility to exploit what Noble might consider to be a third category of neoliberalist commoditization of the university—precisely that same body of students whose collective avoidance of online courses evidences market practices. And/but, of course, paying students instead of charging them might actually reproduce this neoliberal market-based view of the university we are (speaking more broadly now) trying to dismantle (or at the very least interrogate). And so on.

I’ve been overly slippy here at this meditation’s end only to make a point—a provocative line of inquiry that is, I hope, more useful than not. Thanks for making to the end, and thanks also for thinking with me.

After suffering from a prolonged state of austerity, technology found public universities were ripe for the taking; Newfield discusses how public universities were “easy pickings for private firms that promised to use their technology to deliver more education for less money”. But what happened when that function worked too well? Newfield finds that core educational functions had been outsourced to private firms because their promise of more for less fit “so well into the privatization paradigm”. He also identifies that massive open online courses (MOOCs) are found to be a boon one type of vendor to the university. What other types of vendors existed as well to serve the privatizing needs of the university? Who else was in competition with MOOCs vendors for higher ed buzz?

MOOCs apparently had good intentions behind them, to reach global masses that had “been shortchanged, marginalized, or overlooked by their governments”, and it looked like they were assisting the public college in offering students a higher-quality, creativity oriented education by depending on its ability to help its millions of students actively learn. But I said “looked like”. Though the hope was that technology would allow mass specialization, the actual results were a far cry from that lofty goal.

Nevertheless, Newfield identifies that “the conditions were in place for MOOC firms to leverage public funds with relatively small amounts of private capital”, meaning that MOOC firms came at the right time to integrate themselves into the revenue streams of universities. Though they were able to take advantage of weakened universities, they didn’t necessarily reinvent the wheel. Apparently, most MOOCs were largely “digitalized broadcast lectures on conventional course topics”, “‘chunked’ into bite-sized pieces of four to eight minutes, with interactive quizzes and related features”. Did campus administrators know that MOOCs delivered the same content? Or were they too captivated by national media coverage, the promise of the mass market, the growing list of investors, and the interest in in-house certification results?

Was the culture of privatization so pernicious that university administrators ignored the information asymmetry between the engineers that founded MOOC companies and college learning, teaching practices in the contemporary university, the sociology of public colleges and the range of student and learning needs?

Newfield spends some time discussing the Udacity-Georgia Tech Research Corporation contract. He mentions that the only thing that Udacity brought to the table was its platform branding, that it being a first mover was somehow synonymous with Google’s driverless car. But if the promise of faster, better, and cheaper for higher education couldn’t be given, why did university administrators buy-in? If MOOC advocates were aware that hundreds of millions of people were not getting the education they needed, why were they wholly ignorant of how social, political, or historical obstacles to access would be require more than simply a sufficient use of technology to be addressed?

The chapter sees that the Department of Education sponsored a meta-analysis of studies of online education and found that “students in online learning conditions performed modestly better than those receiving face-to-face instruction”. Apparently this comes from the fact that blended or hybrid courses are better than purely online courses. This was the only source of online advantage. Further, according to Newfield, the MOOC model is ignorant of social differences, particularly ethnic and racial differences, dismisses working faculty, overlooks the history of pedagogical research, and was extremely selective in representing its findings—misrepresenting larger results.

I am not debating any of the content in the Fabricant and Brier chapter.  I am dog-earring it and probably citing it in a future paper.  But here are a few of the thoughts that interacting with their detailed summary, at least in my head.

At a 2009 UC Berkeley Teach In, Ananya Roy called online education a subprime education (shortly after the 2008 financial crisis).  She was responding to severe budgets across the California public higher education system, and a recent proposal for an eleventh campus that would be strictly online.  Her analogy (starts at 4:57 in the video:  https://youtu.be/y75Ansf6vDM) is a good framework.  Online affords those who previously denied access to education the opportunity to participate in transformative experience, but without the privileges prime users enjoy.  I have seen the quality of the online offerings at megauniversities such as Southern New Hampshire and Governors State University through online educational services vendors vying for our tuition dollars.  The interactivity is low — a few quizzes after video or pdf readings; a forum; a poorly paid adjunct or facilitator to respond to your threads; assignments that never go anywhere; an automated email that reminds you that your coursework is waiting.  This is the opportunity to rack up educational debt without really receiving an asset.  Subprime.

For administrators this is the new scalable option.  Its the lower level 500+ student courses without limitation of the physical plant, ie. the auditorium only holds 800.  It is concerning that evidence is piling up that this is not a magic bullet (https://nyti.ms/2FVrDo0), and yet more universities are exploring ways to become the next ASU. I have tried to refocus our teaching and learning efforts on supporting faculty regardless of modality … and yet at least twice a week I am having a “programs that can go online” discussion.  And the word I can always count on in that conversation is “scalability.”  Close your eyes and imagine the administrative rage when the tenured faculty teaching online wanted to discuss enrollment caps for their courses, wanted to talk about building community in their cohorts.  Imagine how ill tempered the lot got when the topic of quality online surfaced, or when one of the faculty wanted to open the course and share materials (the university owns half of the IP for these courses).  Don’t fool yourself, this isn’t about broadening  access.  This is about increasing tuition revenue.

Here is the part that gets me.  We shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath water.  I firmly believe in OER, in making content available.  I believe that learning how to teach online makes you a better teacher in the classroom — and it’s also one of the ways I can backfill in a system that doesn’t teach teachers how to teach.  I also believe that digital materials can enhance content and encourage self directed learning.  Gamification, yep, it makes learning fun.  This is all great educational technology … but switching out a classroom for a virtual one with an electronic syllabus, videos and a quiz isn’t going to transform lives.  And it will not absolve our municipalities and administrators from defunding public education, defunding education period.

Here are a couple of fun backlashes to that scalable approach to online (also known as money for nothing):

George Washington U alumni sue university over quality of online program

http://money.com/money/4271027/corinthian-colleges-billion-dollar-judgment/

The video series from the 2009 UCB Teach In is definitely worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL53D65B03FF28A6C7.

So sorry again for not being present tonight! I hope the following passages and questions/provocations can stand in a bit for my contribution to the conversation on Ferguson’s book.

Reading Ferguson’s The Reorder of Things through the lens of last week’s conversation surrounding the systematic enfolding of radicalism into systems and structures that temper or reform those ideologies, I was struck by his pointed criticisms of those revolutionary movements and activities that advocated for both representation and authority in heavily gatekept institutions.

I wanted to draw immediate attention to a few passages that not only speak to this assessment of American institutionality, but to connect them to prior class and blog discussions in which we have questioned whether radical change can be affected within academe, let alone any other Western system of power.

“In the context of the United States and the relative collapse of a national culture that portrayed itself as homogeneous, we can also see the ways in which the American nation-state used local differences to mediate the up­heavals brought about by the student movements. For instance, in Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formations in the United States, the authors define the racial state in the moments after the various antiracist movements in terms of the state’s institutionalization of certain parts of those movements, arguing that the “racial state, in its turn, has been historically constructed by racial movements; it consists of agencies and programs which are the institutionalized responses to racial movements of the past.”21 The racial state for Omi and Winant is not simply the entity on which political demands are made. It is also that political formation that receives its identity and contours from having archived the social movements,” (27).

“Yet, with the widening of state and civil society’s capacities for identification came the expansion of regulatory regimes. As those various movements helped to enter minoritized and colonized cultures into social articulation, minority culture and difference also became items for the development of a new phase of global capital, a phase that would engage elite minorities as its facilitators. In this context, minoritized subjects and practices would enter on the condition that they be regulated, making state and academy within the years after civil rights contradictory sites that claimed demo­cratic representation at the same time that they disciplined minoritized sub­jects as local, parochial, and undeveloped constituencies or as the fragile embodiments of canonical and state ideals. The entrance of minoritized subjects into the academy, the rise of ethnic and women’s studies departments, and the emergence of multiculturalism were part of a context geared toward the development of regimes of identification, incorporation, and regulation, developments that ensured that all things organized in the name of minority difference—people, programs, departments, and centers—would be subject to an ever-present danger,” (190).

Are institutionalized agencies and programs merely perpetuating the subjugation of minoritized subjects through a process of classification and identification? Can radical action exist in or as these responses or is anything attached to the heteropatriarchal and white supremacist system that undergirds dominant ideologies?

“As the history of black studies and the social movements implies, the interdisciplines were both the midwives and the children of affirmative and regulatory modes of power. If the modern university is, as Derrida char­acterized it, “responsible to a nonuniversity agency,” then the student move­ments and the interdisciplines helped to broaden the scope and meaning of “nonuniversity agency,” (111).

Additionally, is characterizing the “interdisciplines” as a “nonuniversity agency” also an act of classifying, identifying, organizing for the purpose of control?